Posted on by TracyC

Witches & Magic-Makers

Eyewitness Books

Witches & Magic-Makers by Douglas Hill, 1997.

I always liked the children’s nonfiction Eyewitness Books because of their fascinating historical details and, especially, their pictures. I have to admit that I used this particular book for a college essay about witchcraft trials because, not only did it provide a good beginning overview on the topic but because, for some reason, books intended for adults tend to skimp on or forego pictures entirely. That always bothers me because there are so many things that can be explained better with a picture than a wordy description.

This book is about the history and legends of witches, wizards, and folk magic around the world. The concept that certain people have an ability to use magic for good or evil is an ancient one, found all over the world. The images we have of the sort of people who can use magic come from a variety of sources, from ancient folklore and legend to modern books and movies.

Real-life people who claimed to have the ability to practice magic or were suspected of doing it were very different from the fictional stories. From ancient times, people who were believed to have magical powers were both revered and feared. Ordinary people wanted the power of magic when they thought it could protect them from harm, heal their illnesses, or tell them important things about the future, but they were also afraid of the harm someone with magical abilities might do to them.

When witches were feared to be evil and harmful, they could be arrested, imprisoned, put on trial, tortured, and even executed. The book explains about witchcraft trials, including a section on the famous Salem witchcraft trial.

I particularly liked the pages in the book that explain specific things that witches and other magic-makers are believed to do and that show the objects and ingredients they use to conduct their spells. There is a page that shows magical amulets of all kinds, which are supposed to bring good luck or protection to their wearers. I noticed that some of these cross over into religion because they are specifically religious jewelry. It might be a matter of belief whether their effects would count under “magic” or the “power of the divine”, but I’ve always thought of magic and divine power as being separate. The linking quality here seems to be about physical objects that are believed to have a power that their owners wouldn’t have without them.

There are also sections about how people would use magic to try to tell the future and about the types of ingredients included in magic potions. (Actual results not guaranteed. I find it interesting, but I’m a skeptic.)

Of course, concepts like these vary around the world. Even when different societies share a belief that some people have the ability to use magic to do things like heal people or tell the future, they have different ideas about how that can be accomplished. The book has separate sections devoted to explaining the concepts of magic in different parts of the world, like Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. The final section in the book explains modern beliefs about New Age magic and Wicca.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies, including one in Chinese).

My Reaction

I already explained at the beginning about how much I like the Eyewitness Books and how I’ve used them before. I really think this series is fascinating and informative for adults as well as kids.

It occurred to me that this particular book is probably about the most potentially controversial book in the series, at least the most potentially controversial one I’ve ever covered. However, I’m not too concerned about it because this isn’t a how-to book about witchcraft. It’s more about history and folklore. I find folklore, history, and culture interesting, but I don’t actually believe in all of the things this book describes as magic.

I did once have an extremely brief foray into magic when I was about 10 years old, which I explained when I covered The Witches of Hopper Street, but I’m a person who comes with limits, which is basically the point of that particular story. I’m still not sure what book I read that time, but whatever it was, it had requirements that I realized I would never want to even try to meet. Let’s just say that people who feel like I do about animal entrails are probably not cut out to be witches, at least not the traditional kind. Since then, my interest in witchcraft has been limited to history and folklore, not actual practice.

As far as Wicca goes, I don’t know too much about actual practice, but for those curious about how it evolved, I recommend this documentary (not child-appropriate) on YouTube about the founder, Gerald Gardner. I love a fun eccentric, and as someone who grew up watching Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks, I have to say that, if you’re going to try to curse someone with magic, I think Hitler is a justifiable target.

Posted on by TracyC

The Mother Goose Cookbook

The Mother Goose Cookbook by Frances Sheridan Goulart, 1970.

I remember reading this book from my local library when I was a kid, and I had to look it up again because there were a couple of things that stuck in my mind about it. First, the recipes in this book are also based on songs and fairy tales, not just nursery rhymes, and second, while there are other cookbooks that use nursery rhymes and fairy tales as themes, this one chooses some of the more unusual ones. There are some common rhymes and references in the book, like using Humpty Dumpty for an egg recipe and referencing Little Miss Muffet for Curds and Whey, but there also less common ones, like Aiken Drum. Overall, I liked the variety of nursery rhyme and fairy tale references in the book, and I think the recipes generally fit the references well.

Second, some of the recipes sound a bit fancy for a child’s cookbook, but as a kid, I found them intriguing because they had a kind of old-fashioned quality that I thought made them seem more like nursery rhyme and fairy tale foods. Because, as a kid, I rarely ever had the patience to read the introductions to books before plunging right in, I missed some of the historical information behind some of these recipes and rhymes that the book explains in its introduction. Rereading this as an adult, though, I really appreciated the thought that the author put into the history of food in nursery rhymes.

The introduction begins by posing the question that many children have asked when hearing or reading nursery rhymes, “What are curds and whey, anyway?” I certainly wondered that when I was a kid, and the book notes that many parents also don’t know the answer. It goes on to explains that the “Mother Goose Era” (not really defined but probably the era when the rhymes were first composed) spans roughly from 1600 to 1800, and the foods mentioned in the rhymes is a mixture of real foods and imaginary ones. The author researched real, historical recipes and adapted them for modern use, while trying to remain as faithful as possible to the original nature of the dishes. In the cases where the author couldn’t find information about the dishes or where the foods mentioned seem to be imaginary, she created original recipes to represent them.

Although the author intends this book for children, I personally thought that the nature of some of the recipes and the difficulty of some of them make them more suitable to nostalgic adults.

The recipes in the book are sorted in alphabetical order, skipping a few letters of the alphabet that they didn’t have recipes to match. Each of the recipes is accompanied by a pen-and-ink picture of the nursery rhymes or fairy tale connected to the recipe, and the pictures are on backgrounds of varying shades of purple and light green.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

The recipes in the book are:

A is for:

Aiken Drum’s Glum Gallimaufry – This is a kind of stew made with mutton and vegetables, one of the dishes that I would think more suitable to an adult than a child. Stews in general aren’t too hard if you start with pre-chopped meat and veggies, but I don’t think many modern children are accustomed to eating mutton or would be interested in doing so. At least, in the United States, mutton isn’t a very common food.

B is for:

Betty Pringle’s Pastry Pigs

Bubble and Squeak, a la Bo-Peep – This is a dish made with lamb and cabbage.

C is for:

Cock Robin en Cocotte – I never liked this rhyme, and the recipe is for cooking small poultry.

Curds and Whey, One Way – It doesn’t precisely define what “Curds and Whey” are, but it’s a dairy dish made with soured milk and oatmeal.

Curds and Whey, Another Way – There’s a second method for making it.

D is for:

Daffy-Down-Dilly’s Jolly Jelly

Dappled Grey’s Farthing-a-Mare Gingerbread

E is for:

Elsie Marley’s Nine O’Clock Barley

F is for:

The Fatted Figs from Budleigh Fair – This one asks you to fry figs in fritter batter, but it doesn’t give you the recipe for the batter.

Four-and-Twenty Blackbird Pye – This is another recipe that I think only an adult might try. The “blackbirds” are made from beef liver.

G is for:

Good Pulled Bread for Tommy Tucker

H is for:

Hickory Dickory Flummery – A flummery is a type of old-fashioned dessert.

I is for:

Intery Mintery Cutery Corn

J is for:

Jack-a-Dandy Kissing Candy – This is a very old-fashioned candy – candied rose petals and violets. I think I have had candied flowers at a living history museum, but I’m not sure where to get the rose petals and violets to make any myself.

Jack and Jill Johnnycakes – This recipe is accompanied by a vinegar pudding sauce.

K is for:

King Arthur’s Bag Pudding en Croute

King Boggen’s Three-Farthing Turnips

L is for:

Little Betty Botter’s Better Butter Batter – This is a shortbread recipe

L’Orangerie St. Clemens

M is for:

Margery Daw, Petit Pois – This is a dish of peas, but there’s a little game as a twist. You add either a corn kernel or a small onion to the peas, and whoever gets the corn or onion on their plate has good luck.

O is for:

Oeufs a la Humpty Dumpty – “Oeufs” is the French word for eggs. This recipe wants you to serve it with Bechamel sauce, but there’s no recipe for the sauce.

P is for:

Pease Porridge Chaud-Froid – This porridge is made with oatmeal instead of peas.

Peter’s Pickled Peppers

Pippin Hill Ladyfingers – This is a dessert made with apples.

Punch and Judy Rolling Pin Pie – This is an apple pie recipe.

Q is for:

Queen of Heart’s Purloined Tarts – These are heart-shaped cherry tarts.

R is for:

Rowly Powly’s Roly-Poly – The name of this rhyme is unfamiliar to me, but I know a variation of it under the name Georgie Porgie.

S is for:

A Salamagundi for Solomon Grundy – This is a dish with potatoes, carrots, and onions.

St. Dunstan’s Belfry Bacon

St. Swithin’s Rainwater Tea – This is a recipe for an herbal tea made with actual rain water. I’m not sure that I would recommend people actually gathering and drinking rain water, but the herbal tea sounds nice, and this section does explain a little about St. Swithin and the tradition behind the rhyme that goes with it.

Simple Simon’s Ha’Penny Buns

Slitherum Slatherum Soul Cakes – I was fascinated by the recipe for Soul Cakes, an old tradition from Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day. The book says that they should be made on the eve before All Souls Day (evening of November 1) rather than Halloween. However, from my earlier Halloween research, I know that different countries and regions had their own traditions and their own recipes for Soul Cakes. There is no single, universal recipe for Soul Cakes.

T is for:

Three Men in a Tub Pommes de Terre – This is basically a recipe for french fries, using three potatoes soaked in a tub of ice water before being fried in hot fat. (The book doesn’t explain why, but I know that doing that makes them crispier.)

Tuppeny Rice – This is a sweet rice dish made with cinnamon and sugar and marmalade.

Tweedle Dee’s Dumplings a Deux – These dumplings include cow’s liver.

W is for:

Willy Wood’s Wondrous Pennyloaves

Y is for:

Yankee Doodle’s Pepperbox Noodles

Z is for:

“sleeping after all this good eating!”

Posted on by TracyC

This Singing World

This Singing World collected and edited by Louis Untermeyer, 1923, 1926.

This little book is a collection of beautiful, classic children’s poems by some of the most famous poets for children and adults from the 19th century and early 20th century! Some of the poems are by Louis Untermeyer, the compiler of the book, but there are also poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lewis Carroll, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, John Masefield, Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, Walter de la Mare, Hilaire Belloc, and many others. In the book’s introduction, he says that most of the poems in the book “were written by living poets.” None of them are alive now, in the 2020s, but many (although not all) of the poets included were alive when this book was first compiled and published.

There are too many poems to list all the ones that appear in this book, but they are grouped by themes. Each section begins with a black-and-white illustration based on one of the poems in that section. There is also an interesting section of Notes in the back of the book that has extra information about some of the poems. I overlooked the Notes the first time I read the book, but it’s really worth seeing. Louis Untermeyer explains some of the background to his own poems there and also explains some of the background of other poems, pointing out ones that were based on real life incidents, giving some information about the authors of different poems, or explaining a little about the style of a poem. Although, Louis Untermeyer says that readers who prefer just to be left alone to read and enjoy are free to skip the Notes, anticipating exactly how I felt and what I did when I was a kid. I appreciate the extra information more now, so I’m glad it’s there, but I appreciate the Louis Untermeyer understood some things about how children’s minds work.

The author’s Introduction and A Few After-Words, two sections which I would also never have bothered to read when I was a child, are also worth reading because they take into account the feelings of child readers and his own philosophies about presenting poems to children. In A Few After-Words, the Louis Untermeyer addresses children reading the book and says that he wants them to know, whether their parents or teachers like it or not, that poems shouldn’t be taught in a formal way because turning them into lessons and picking them to pieces for analysis takes all the life and beauty out of them. He describes having gone to a lecture titled “How to Read a Poem in the Class Room”, which was an hour long (and a very long 60 minutes, to hear him describe it), where the lecturer outlined all the ways poems could be read and analyzed, never once mentioning “enjoyment.” Louis Untermeyer’s opinion was poems are best when read aloud, experienced, and not over-analyzed. (A philosophy not unlike that of the teacher in Dead Poet’s Society.) He is well aware, as he said in the Introduction, that nobody is going to like all of the poems in the book because they’re all very different from each other, but he hopes that there will be something in the book for everyone. He emphasizes, “don’t force yourself to like any of these poems just because they happen to be printed in this book.” He wants readers to explore what appeals to them now, in the phase of life they’re in, and be open to considering other poems later because some of them may take on more meaning for them later in life. I wish this man had been alive to be one of my high school English teachers because I argued about things like this with the teachers I had.

Sections in the Book:

Songs of Awakening

Poems about morning, sunrise, and day. This section includes Sunrise by Lizette Woodworth Reese.

Breath of the Earth and Sea

Poems about nature. This section includes The Storm and Autumn by Emily Dickinson.

Open Roads

Poems about travel. This section includes The Joys of the Road by Bliss Carman, I Want to Go Wandering by Vachel Lindsay, and The Road to Anywhere by Bert Leston Taylor.

Common Things

Poems about everyday events and small pleasures. This section includes Simplicity by Emily Dickinson, The Commonplace by Walt Whitman, and Escape at Bedtime by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Places

Poems about fascinating places. This section includes Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost.

Children and Other People

Poems about children and interesting characters. This section includes The Young Mystic by Louis Untermeyer, The Children’s Hour by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and The Land of Story-Books by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Birds and Beasts

Poems about birds and animals. This section includes The Runaway by Robert Frost and The Blackbird by W. E. Henley.

Fairies and Phantoms

Poems about fairies and other supernatural creatures. This section includes Little Orphant Annie by James Whitcomb Riley, Disenchantment by Louis Untermeyer, and I’d Love to be a Fairy’s Child by Robert Graves.

Words and Music

Poems about music and poetry itself. This section includes Ode by Arthur O’Shaughnessy and The Singer by Anna Wickham.

Whims and Fantasies

Poems about imagination. This section includes Apparitions by Robert Browning.

Tales and Ballads

Poems that tell a story. This section includes The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.

Laughing Legends

Humorous poems and poems about silly things. This section includes The Lost Shoe by Walter de la Mare and The Twins by Henry S. Leigh.

Fables in Foolscap

Poems that have a moral or lesson, although the morals and lessons are silly ones. This section includes The Embarrassing Episode of Little Miss Muffet by Guy Wetmore Carryl.

Rhyme Without Reason

Nonsense poems. This section includes The Snark by Lewis Carroll, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat by Edward Lear, and Topsy-Turvy World by William Brighty Rands.

Croons and Lullabies

Poems about night and sleep. This section includes Wynken, Blynken, and Nod by Eugene Field.

Stars to Hitch To

Poems to inspire. This section includes The Arrow and the Song by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

The Heroic Heart

Poems about courage and brave deeds. This section includes Opportunity by Edward Rowland Will and Invictus by W. E. Henley.

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What To Do About Alice?

What To Do About Alice? by Barbara Kerley, illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham, 2008.

Theodore Roosevelt had done many things in his life, from herding cattle to hunting grizzly bears, but one thing he could never seem to do was manage his daughter, Alice. From early childhood, Alice was a lively girl, always having things she wanted to do and places to go. She called it, “eating up the world.”

Alice’s mother died when she was a baby, only two days after she was born. The loss was very difficult for her father, and people felt sorry for Alice. However, since Alice had no memories of her mother, she didn’t feel the loss so much, and she didn’t want people to pity her. Eventually, her father remarried, and Alice had half-siblings. Because of her father’s political career, the family traveled between New York and Washington, DC. Alice enjoyed this lifestyle and the experiences she had in different places where they lived.

For the most part, Alice’s childhood busy and full of fascinating experiences, but she did have problems as well. She went through a period where she had to wear braces on her legs because they weren’t growing properly. (The book doesn’t explain why she had this condition, partly because the exact cause is unknown. The common belief was that she might have had a mild form of polio, but that isn’t definite.) The braces worked, and eventually, she no longer had to wear them. Her father encouraged her to engage in physical activities and learn to ride a bicycle because he didn’t want her previous condition to make her overly cautious.

It turned out that there was little need to worry about that. Alice was a wild child! She would run off to explore the cities where she lived, and she once joined an all-boys club, sneaking them in disguised as girls! Concerned that Alice was getting too wild and becoming a bit of a “tomboy” (a girl who acts like a boy and likes things boys like – I don’t think this term is used as much anymore because the modern view is more that people shouldn’t allow themselves to confine their interests based on gender stereotypes).

Theodore Roosevelt considered sending Alice to boarding school to give her some discipline and teach her more ladylike habits, but the idea upset Alice so much that he eventually decided to let her continue her education at home. Alice used the books in her father’s library to study seriously. She read books by famous authors and studied subjects like Greek, geology, and astronomy, discussing them with her father.

When Alice was seventeen years old, Theodore Roosevelt was elected President of the United States. Alice and her half-siblings thrilled people with their wild behavior and exotic pets. (The book mentions Alice’s pet snake, Emily Spinach.) However, Alice also developed a serious interest in politics. She became a goodwill ambassador and took part in public projects, like the Buffalo Exposition. Her antics often became the subject of newspaper reports and society gossip. It earned her some criticism, but because she was such a personable young woman, she was also a social success. She gained the nickname of “Princess Alice.”

Eventually, Alice married a congressman named Nicholas Longworth. She continued to act as an advisor to her father and take part in diplomatic events. The entire time, she was known as an irrepressible personality!

My Reaction

I enjoyed the book for its fun look at a colorful character from American history, although it was on the cartoonish side. In multiple pictures, she is shown holding a giant spoon. It confused me a little at first, and then, I realized that it was a reference to her saying about “eating up the world.”

The Roosevelts were a colorful family in general. Teddy Roosevelt encouraged his children (and nieces and nephews, as explained in the book about Alice’s cousin, Eleanor) to be brave and daring, and Alice and her half-siblings were known for their wild stunts and the small zoo of bizarre animals that members of the family kept as pets. The book shows Alice and her half-siblings sliding down the stairs in the White House on serving trays, something that they did in real life, although it doesn’t explain in the text that’s what they were doing.

Alice was both a scandalous figure and an admired person in her time, and I thought the book did a good job showing that. She was an eccentric person who often trampled on social conventions, but she was also a highly social person and pleasant to be around, so she tended to shine in social and diplomatic situations.

Her life wasn’t always as happy and cheerful as the story shows. She had tensions with both her father and stepmother while she was growing up, and her marriage wasn’t especially happy. There were times when she opposed her husband politically, and she is also known to have had affairs with other men. Her daughter was probably the result of one of these affairs. Of course, these darker subjects aren’t exactly suitable for a children’s picture book. The book gives enough of an indication of tensions within her family by showing her father’s reactions to her various antics and the way she threw fits to convince her father not to send her to a traditional school. Overall, the book is a fun introduction to the life of a fascinating but complex person.

Posted on by TracyC

When Clay Sings

When Clay Sings by Byrd Baylor, illustrated by Tom Bahti, 1972.

This children’s picture book is a salute to the ancient makers of Native American pottery, dedicated to these makers and the museums that preserve their work. It’s written as free form poetry with images of the American Southwest and designs from Native American pottery.

The story sets the scene on a desert hillside, where pieces of ancient pottery are buried. Sometimes, Indian (Native American) children dig up pieces of old pottery, and their parents remind them to be respectful of what they find because they are pieces of the past and of lives that went before. Sometimes, they’re lucky enough to find pieces that fit together or even a bowl that isn’t broken.

They reflect on the time and skill that went into making the pottery and how strong the pottery would have to be to last well beyond the lives of the people who made it. They think about the people who painted the beautiful designs on the pots and what their lives were like. Could their own children have requested favorite pictures painted on their bowls?

Some designs show animals or bugs or hunters, but others show bizarre creatures that might be monsters or spirits. Others show a medicine man trying to cure a child, ceremonies, dancers in masks and costumes, or the traditional flute player. People can reflect on the lives of those long-ago people and how they compare to the lives of people today.

There is a map in the back of the book which shows the areas of the American Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado) where the pottery designs the book uses originated from and the tribes that used them.

This is a Caldecott Honor Book. It is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies).

My Reaction

I grew up in Arizona, and I remember our school librarian reading books by Byrd Baylor to us in elementary school during the late 1980s or early 1990s. She wanted to introduce us to this author because she wrote about the area of the United States where we lived. In fact, this book about pottery was fitting because, when they were building our school in the 1970s, they found some ancient pottery. They used to have it on display in the school library. Even to this day, it’s common for people creating buildings in this area to have the site surveyed by archaeologists. Finds are fairly common, and the usual procedure is to thoroughly document everything that gets uncovered before burying it again in the same location and constructing the building over it. One of the reason why they usually rebury finds is that, in this dry, desert climate, putting them back into the ground will actually preserve them very well. It’s possible that later generations will find them again (especially with the location documented) when the building is gone or no longer necessary, but they may have better instruments or techniques for analyzing them.

I’m a little divided on how much I like this book, though. On the one hand, I like books about folklore and traditional crafts, and this book focuses on a geographical area that’s very familiar to me. On the other hand, the free verse poetry that reflects on the feelings of people about the pottery doesn’t appeal to me quite as much as books which show the process of making it, like The Little Indian Pottery Maker. I like to see the process and learn more of the known background legends of some of the designs than just try to imagine what things might have been going through the minds of the designers. Toward the end of the book, they show the legendary humpbacked flute player, but they don’t tell you that this figure is called Kokopelli and that there are legends about him. It’s a nice book, but I just felt like there was potential to include more background information.

This book uses the word “Indian” for “Native American” or “America Indian”, which is common in older children’s books.

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Raggedy Ann and Andy’s Cookbook

Raggedy Ann and Andy’s Cookbook by Nika Hazelton, 1975.

This children’s cookbook is inspired by the classic Raggedy Ann and Andy stories, and the recipes are accompanied by illustrations from the original books and quotes from the stories. I think the concept is charming, although I noticed that the quotes included with the recipes don’t always match what the recipes actually are. I think that’s because the author decided to include recipes that don’t relate to the stories directly. For example, the quote included with one of the recipes for breakfast cereal is about sausages, and there is no recipe that includes sausages in the chapter of breakfast recipes.

That being said, I thought that the book had an interesting selection of recipes. Some of the recipes are classics, like pancakes, different types of sandwiches, chicken, meatloaf, and some easy desserts. Some recipes are a little old-fashioned, like the one that is designed for an electric frying pan. I haven’t seen electric frying pans for years, and I’m not sure if people still use them. Other recipes in the book strike me as being very mid-20th century in style, such as the salads that contain some mixtures of ingredients that I think 21st century children might find odd. I noticed that the recipe for baked onions has a note that this might be a treat “for your Daddy or Mommy”, a sort of acknowledgement that an adult might enjoy a baked onion more than a kid would, although the recipe is easy enough for a kid to do, baking the onions alongside baked potatoes.

The book begins with a short chapter about cooking tips, and I was surprised by the instructions for cleaning fish that were included later in the book, with the assumption that kids might be helping to cook fish that they actually caught. It is logical that some kids might actually go fishing and catch fish, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a cookbook for children with that assumption or those instructions. Most seem to assume that kids are using store-bought ingredients for their recipes.

The main chapters of the book are:

Beautiful Breakfasts

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Two recipes for making your own breakfast cereal
  • Cinnamon Toast
  • Pancakes
  • Baked Ham
  • Nest Egg
  • Electric Frying Pan Breakfast – I don’t know if people use electric frying pans anymore. I’ve seen them before but not for a long time. The breakfast included in this recipe is for bacon, eggs, and toast.

Lovely Lunches

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Cheese and Apple Sandwiches
  • Cream Cheese and Berry Sandwiches
  • Ham, Lettuce, and Cheese Sandwich
  • Stuffed Pita Pocket – The filling is cucumber, tomato, lettuce, and cheese.
  • Savory Cheese and Bread Pudding
  • Baked Cheesy Eggs

Super Salads

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Raggedy Ann Salad – This salad is meant to be shaped like Raggedy Ann’s face, with a canned peach half for the head, raisins for eyes, a piece of pepper for a nose, pimiento for the mouth, and grated carrot for hair.
  • Tossed Green Salad
  • French Dressing
  • Carrot, Apple and Raisin Salad
  • Tomato Salad
  • Guacamole Salad
  • Cucumber Galleons – Cucumbers are cut and decorated to look like boats with lettuce for sails.

Scrumptious Suppers

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Corn Chowder
  • French Onion Soup
  • Rice
  • Roast Corn
  • Corn Fritters
  • Green Peas with Bacon
  • How to clean and cook a small fish
  • Oven-fried Chicken Legs
  • Baked Chicken
  • Hand-mixed Meat Loaf
  • How to Make an Oven-cooked Dinner for a Friend
  • Baked Potato
  • Baked Onion
  • Oven Hamburgers
  • How to Make a Spaghetti Dinner for Four
  • Tomato Sauce
  • Spaghetti
  • Italian Bread Sticks

Delectable Desserts

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Baked Apple
  • Smores
  • Yoghurt-and-Fruit
  • Dessert Ladyfinger Sandwiches
  • Hot Bananas
  • Frozen Bananas and More Frozen Bananas
  • Chocolate Bar Mousse
  • Lemon Gelatin
  • Elegant Melon Dessert
  • Gingerbread Men
  • Three Hole Chocolate Cake
  • Brownies

Terrific Treats

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Ice Cream Soda and Super Ice Cream Soda
  • Thick Milk Shake
  • Honey Sauce for Ice Cream
  • Boston Cooler
  • Strawberry Ice-Cubes Milk
  • Fruit Candy Treats
  • Party Punch
  • Chocolate Raisins
  • Popcorn Party
Posted on by TracyC

Raggedy Ann’s Tea Party Book

Raggedy Ann’s Tea Party Book by Elizabeth Silbaugh, illustrated by Laura Francesca Filippucci, 1999.

This book is a children’s guide to planning a tea party with Raggedy Ann. As in the original books, Raggedy Ann is a doll who lives with a girl named Marcella, and she likes to have tea parties with Marcella’s other dolls and stuffed animals.

The book explains how to plan and prepare for a tea party, from figuring out how many guests there will be and making sure there are enough seats for everyone to choosing a menu and games to play. There are tips for making party invitations and a section of recipes in the back of the book.

The food ideas aren’t too complicated. The book recommends keeping preparations simple because a party is about having fun. Setting the table is an activity by itself. Raggedy Ann gets her guests to help her, and they put on music while they do it. They want to make the table setting pretty, and they make sure that everyone knows each other and is included in the conversation. Tea parties are a time to practice good manners and make sure everyone is enjoying the party. At the end of the party, guests can also help clean up while they play music.

For games to play, they recommend the classic game of Telephone, Fiddly Diddly (a guessing game), and Memory Tray, where guests look at a tray of objects for a limited amount of time and then try to remember everything they’ve seen.

The recipes included in the book are:

  • Easy Chocolate Cakes
  • Creamy Pink and White Icing
  • Tiny Sandwiches – They suggest a variety of possible fillings, including tuna, ham, tomato, hard-boiled egg, cucumbers, cheese, fruit, or jam.
  • Raggedy Ann’s Candy-Heart Cookies – These are heart-shaped cutout cookies because Raggedy Ann has a candy heart.
  • Uncle Clem’s Super-Simple Scotch Shortbread
  • Marcella’s Lemonade

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive (multiple copies). There is another book by the same author called Raggedy Ann’s Birthday Party Book, about planning a birthday party.

My Reaction

I found it charming and nostalgic, and I loved the colorful pictures! I didn’t read this book as a child, but it is the kind of book I would have liked. The party-planning tips are useful, taking child readers step-by-step through planning the party, inviting the guests, and preparing food and entertainment. I liked the advice to keep things simple, so even the host/hostess can enjoy the party instead of getting stressed over complicating preparations. The recipes in the book fit the tea party theme, and they are simple enough for children to make or at least help in their preparation without being overly simplistic.

Posted on by TracyC

A Pioneer Thanksgiving

A Pioneer Thanksgiving by Barbara Greenwood, illustrated by Heather Collins, 1999.

This book is part story, part history, and part craft and activity book. It tells the story of a particular pioneer family’s Thanksgiving celebration in 1841 to explain the sort of Thanksgiving celebrations that pioneer families would have at the time, and there are related activities and recipes to accompany the story.

Everyone in the Robertson family helps with preparing the food for the Thanksgiving feast, including the family’s neighbors, who will be joining them. The story is episodic, focusing on different family members and their adventures and activities through the Thanksgiving preparations.

As they begin their preparations, they are worried about Granny, who is unwell. Mrs. Robertson is afraid that she might die because she doesn’t seem to be improving. As Sarah reads to her, Granny expresses a wish to taste her mother’s cranberry sauce one more time.

Sarah decides to go out and gather some cranberries for the sauce herself, but her little sister, Lizzie, tags along with her. The cranberry bog isn’t safe. Lizzie falls in and nearly drowns. Sarah manages to save her, but she’s very upset at almost losing Lizzie. However, her brother George finds Sarah’s basket of cranberries and brings it back to the house. The first activity in the book is a recipe for cranberry sauce.

Willie, one of the boys in the family, almost gets lost while looking for chestnuts for his mother’s chestnut stuffing, and he plays a game of Conkers with a Native American (First Peoples) friend, whose family trades foods with the Robertson family. Part of the story explains about Ojibwa and Iroquois thanksgiving ceremonies, and there are instructions in the book for playing Conkers with chestnuts and a Native American game with peach stones.

The younger children go into the woods to gather nuts, and there are instructions for weaving a nutting basket. Meg, the oldest girl in the family, makes bread with interesting designs, and there’s a recipe for bread. Sarah makes a Corn Dolly, and Granny explains the superstition of making a Corn Dolly and then plowing the Corn Dolly back into the soil at the beginning of the next planting season to ensure a good harvest.

Mr. Burkholder, their neighbor, tells them a story about when his family had newly arrived in North America and they had little food. Then, there is a section about weather and now to make a weather vane. Finally, everyone gathers at the table to say grace and enjoy the feast!

In the back of the book, there is a section about the history of Thanksgiving as a holiday in North America, both in the US and Canada. This book is actually set in Canada, and it explains that the date of Canandian Thanksgiving celebrations wasn’t initially fixed. Sometimes, they could be in October and sometimes in November. Canadian Thanksgiving was finally established as the second Monday in October in 1957.

I couldn’t find a copy of this book online, but I did find a copy on Internet Archive of a related book by the same author about the same pioneer family in Canada.

My Reaction

Although the book doesn’t say exactly where this family is other than North America, the other book about the family establishes that they are in Canada, and the references to Native Americans as “First Peoples” confirms it. When I first started reading the book, I thought that the pioneer family was somewhere in the United States or its territories. The lifestyle that the Canadian pioneers lived seems very similar to the way pioneers in the United States lived around that time, so I think the recounting of this family’s holiday would still be of interest to fans of the Little House on the Prairie series and similar books.

Hearing about Canadian Thanksgiving was interesting, and I liked the inclusion of information about the Thanksgiving traditions of the First Peoples and immigrants to Canada. The family in the story was originally from Scotland, and the grandmother in the story talks about how Thanksgiving celebrations remind her of the Harvest Home celebrations back in Scotland.

The book has a good selection of different types of activities for readers to try, from recipes to games to crafts. It seems like there is something here that could appeal to many people with different interests. Each of the activities appears next to a part of the story that references it, so readers can feel like they’re taking part in the activities along with the people in the story. I also really love the realistic art style in the illustrations!

Posted on by TracyC

A Native American Feast

A Native American Feast by Lucille Recht Penner, 1994.

This nonfiction children’s book explains the traditional foods of different Native American tribes and how they were prepared. (Throughout the book, they are referred to both as “Native Americans” and “Indians”, but mostly, the book uses the term “Native Americans.” The focus is on Native American tribes in the area that is now the United States, but the book includes information about various tribes across the United States.)

It starts with an Introduction that explains how European settlers came to North America and how the first settlers almost starved to death because they weren’t prepared for the conditions they found and didn’t understand the plants and foods of the Americas. In those early years of the colonies, the colonists relied heavily on help from nearby Native American tribes in learning techniques for hunting and growing food in North America. These colonists had to adopt some of the Native American foods and techniques of getting food in order to survive. Not only did European colonists adopt some foods used by Native Americans, but Native Americans also adopted foods that were introduced to them from Europeans, including some plants and grains, like apples and wheat, and some domesticated animals, like sheep. The focus of this book is on Native Americans and their cooking and eating habits, both pre-colonization and post-colonization. For more information about what the colonists were cooking and eating, see The Colonial Cookbook.

The book explains how we know what we know about Native American foods and cooking. Some information was recorded by early European colonists in America and European scientists who were interested in plants of the Americas, and archaeology provides information in the form of animal bones, clamshells, and pollen from plants that Native Americans cultivated, going back hundreds and even thousands of years. Native American eating habits shifted throughout their history, although they shifted very abruptly with the European colonization of North America.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Contents

Every chapter, including the Introduction, contains recipes that readers can make at home. Some of them are easier than others. Some recipes include pieces of Native American folklore about them or the foods in the recipes. Many of the illustrations are 19th century drawings.

Rather than organizing the book based on tribe or geographic region, the chapters of the book are based around particular types of food or cooking and eating concepts:

Introduction

This section introduces how historians know about the history of food among Native American tribes and how their diets changed after the arrival of Europeans.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Hickory Nut Soup
  • Green Succotash
  • Pueblo Peach Crisp

Discovering America

This section includes information about the earliest known hunting and cooking habits of Native Americans. It includes a description of the “land bridge” theory of how the ancestors of Native Americans arrived in the Americas from Asia. As of the early 21st century, we still don’t have a definitive answer for precisely how ancient people first arrived in the Americas, more recent theories include the possibility of these ancient people being seafaring rather than finding a land crossing, although the land crossing theory is also still possible.

Then, it explains about the arrival of the European colonists. It doesn’t sugar coat that the arrival of the colonists and their westward expansion led to the extinction and endangerment of native animal species because these newcomers hunted them without restraint. The introduction of unfamiliar diseases, like measles and smallpox, to the Native Americans took many lives, sometimes even killing whole tribes. These drastic changes greatly impacted the lives and lifestyles of Native Americans, although some traditional habits survived, including the preparation of traditional types of foods.

There are no recipes in this chapter.

A Great Mystery

This chapter explains about hunting and gathering and the development of agriculture among ancient Native American tribes. The “mystery” is about the development of corn as we know it. It was never really a wild plant. The evidence suggests that ancient Native Americans deliberately created it by cross-pollinating different wild grass plants, but it isn’t really known which ones. Most of this chapter explains how widespread corn was as a food and the uses and folklore that different tribes had for it.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Roasted Corn on the Cob
  • Blue Pinole – a blue cornmeal-based drink with sugar and cinnamon, from the Southwest
  • Thumbprint Bread (Kolatquvil)
  • Hopi Blue Marbles – boiled balls of blue cornmeal dough, a traditional breakfast food
  • Wagmiza Wasna – a mixture of cornmeal and dried berries

Treasure

This section is about foods that Native Americans introduced to the rest of the world, like pumpkins, peanuts, chili peppers, sunflower seeds, maple sugar, and different varieties of beans, including kidney beans and lima beans.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Cherokee Bean Balls
  • Apache Pumpkin with Sunflower Seeds
  • Popped Wild Rice
  • Zuni Green Chili Stew

The Hunt

This chapter is about Native American hunting techniques and the animals they hunted.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Broiled Buffalo Steaks
  • Venison and Hominy Stew

Feast and Famine

This chapter is about Native Americans who lived in areas where food was scarce and ways of foraging for food during times of famine. It also explains special feast days.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Mouse Cache Soup – made with beef broth and seeds: sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, buckwheat groats, and millet
  • Iroquois Strawberry Drink
  • Mushrooms Cooked in Oil

Berries, Flowers, and Bear Fat

This chapter explains the seasonings that Native Americans added to food and cooking techniques that added nutrients.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Fried Squash Blossoms
  • Pemmican Cakes – the origins of beef jerky
  • Maple Sugar Drink
  • Wild Grape Dumplings
  • Inuit Ice Cream – a berry dessert originally made with seal oil but made with egg whites here
  • Wojapi – a Sioux fruit pudding

Lighting the Fire

This chapter is about how plants and animals were processed to make them ready for cooking, such as how corn and acorns were ground into flour and how animals were butchered. When they had to boil water, they often used vessels that would have been damaged if they were put directly over fire, so they would heat stones and put them into the water instead.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Broiled Salmon Steaks with Juniper Berries
  • Broiled Rabbit with Corn Dumplings
  • Baked Beans with Maple Sugar

A Basketful of Water

Native Americans didn’t have cooking pots and pans made out of metal or glass until after the European colonists arrived. Before that, their cooking vessels were made of wood, stone, pottery, or tightly-woven baskets. This chapter explains the different types of cooking vessels they had, including the shells of pumpkins and gourds.

Recipes in this section are:

  • Pumpkin Shell Soup

Good Manners

This short chapter is about eating manners, superstitions, and taboos among different tribes. There are no recipes.

Thanksgiving

This section explains how Native Americans would give thanks to their Creator or Great Spirit or Nature or to animals and plants themselves for the foods that helped keep them alive. There are no recipes in this chapter.

Posted on by TracyC

The Little House Cookbook

The Little House Cookbook by Barbara M. Walker, illustrated by Garth Williams, 1979.

This children’s cookbook is based on the foods eaten in the Little House on the Prairie series. The series follows a farm family, and food is very important in the stories. I like the book because it provides historical explanations about the types foods that frontier families would eat. The illustrations in the books come from the original books.

The chapters in the book are:

Food in the Little Houses

The first chapter of the book explains about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family and how much of their time on the frontier was occupied with finding and producing food. The foods that they ate were ones they grew and hunted themselves. They had to prepare everything from scratch, and even the children in the family helped. When they had difficult times, there was often little to eat.

The chapter also discusses the nutrition of a pioneer diet. They didn’t understand much about the science behind vitamins and nutrition, but because their lives were based around hard physical labor, they were able to tolerate diets that were heavier in starches and sweets than most modern people would have.

It also describes how celebrations and social occasions centered around food.

The Cook’s Domain

This chapter discusses what pioneer and farming families had in their kitchens and how they would cook and store food.

Staples from the Country Store

Although pioneers tried to be as self-sufficient as they could, nobody could ever make absolutely everything they needed. Country stores supplied a variety of good, especially the things that farmers couldn’t make by themselves, like farm tools, cooking pots, sewing supplies, guns, and some food staples that wouldn’t be produced by farms in the area or that required processing, like molasses and cornmeal. Country stores also allowed farmers to buy on credit or trade produce and other goods they had for ones they needed because they didn’t always have cash on hand.

The first two chapters were just informational, but this is the chapter where recipes start appear. Each of the recipes is accompanied by a quote from one of the Little House books where the dish is mentioned and some historical information. The recipes in this chapter are:

  • Fried salt pork with gravy
  • Hasty pudding
  • Fried cornmeal mush (a dish my grandmother said she ate growing up on a farm in Indiana in the 1920s and 1930s)
  • Johnny-cake
  • Corn dodgers
  • Cornbread
  • Crackling cornbread
  • Baked beans
  • Bean soup
  • Bean porridge
  • Oyster soup
  • Codfish balls

Foods from the Woods, Wilds, and Water

Pioneer families relied heavily on animals they could hunt and plants they could forage for food, like berries. This chapter discusses how they would process and prepare animals they hunted and what they could make with foods found in the wild. Personally, I have no interest in hunting, but the historical information is interesting. The recipes in this chapter are:

  • Stewed jack rabbit and dumplings
  • Spit-roasted wild duck
  • Blackbird pie
  • Fried fish
  • Roasted wild turkey with cornbread stuffing
  • Cranberry jelly
  • Blueberry pudding with a sauce
  • Huckleberry pie
  • Sun-dried wild fruit
  • Stewed dried fruit
  • Crab-apple jelly
  • Plum preserves
  • Husk-tomato preserves
  • Strawberry jam

Foods from Tilled Fields

This chapter discusses the crops farms produced, particularly wheat. There are recipes for different types of bread, biscuits, dumplings, crackers, doughnuts, and pancakes. There’s also a recipe for hardtack, which was a staple food for people going on long journeys because is wasn’t as perishable as other foods.

Foods from Gardens and Orchards

This chapter is about the types of fruits and vegetables that a family like the Ingalls would grow. It explains that these vegetables have changed over time because farmers developed new varieties of familiar foods, like potatoes. The flavors of these newer varieties aren’t quite the same as the old ones, but the newer varieties produce more food and are more resistant to disease.

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Mashed potatoes
  • Potato cakes
  • Fried potatoes
  • Hashed brown potatoes
  • Creamed carrots
  • Dried corn and creamed corn
  • Fried parsnips
  • Succotash – a dish of mixed vegetables with lima beans and corn
  • Lettuce leaves with vinegar and sugar
  • Ripe tomatoes with sugar and cream
  • Baked Hubbard squash
  • Raw turnip snacks
  • Mashed turnips
  • Stewed pumpkin
  • Pumpkin pie
  • Green pumpkin pie – It uses an unripened pumpkin, and it tastes a lot like an apple pie.
  • Apple turnovers
  • Apple pie
  • Birds’ Nest pudding – an apple dessert
  • Fried apples ‘n’ onions
  • Dried apples
  • Dried apple and raisin pie
  • Apple-core vinegar
  • Tomato preserves
  • Beet pickles
  • Green cucumber pickles
  • Green tomato pickles

Foods from the Barnyard

This chapter is about the types of animals kept on a farm as sources of meat, dairy, eggs, and fat.

The recipes included in this chapter are:

  • Lard and cracklings
  • Baked spareribs
  • Homemade sausage
  • Roasted pig
  • Mincemeat
  • Poached fresh eggs
  • Fried chicken
  • Chicken pie
  • Stuffed roasted hen
  • Roasted stuffed goose
  • Butter
  • Cottage cheese balls
  • Hard cheese
  • Pot roast of ox with browned flour gravy

Thirst Quenchers and Treats

This chapter covers special treats that farming families would have made or been able to buy at the general store. It explains the history and evolution of penny candies and other store-bought treats.

The recipes included in the chapter are:

  • Eggnog
  • Ginger water
  • Cambric tea
  • Lemonade
  • Pulled candy
  • Molasses-on-Snow candy
  • Vinegar pie
  • Custard pie
  • Heart-shaped cakes
  • Vanity cakes
  • Pound cake
  • Laura’s wedding cake
  • Sugar frosting
  • Ice cream
  • Parched corn
  • Popcorn
  • Popcorn balls
  • Popcorn and milk

There is a glossary in the back and a table of conversions.

One more thing I want to note is that the book refers to Native Americans as “Indians”, which is common in older books. There isn’t much information about Native Americans in the book because the focus is on pioneer farming families, but they are mentioned occasionally when there’s historical information about the origin and evolution of certain types of foods.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.